British-English Language Tools

A collection of British-English language tools.

Introduction

It is almost impossible to find a purely British-English dictionary or word list. By default, Oxford and Cambridge include US/CAD/AUS English variants and references in their published dictionaries and on their websites. Further, what is often labelled as 'en-GB' is almost always, in fact, International English.

Editorial Policy

The original word list contained over 150,000 entries, compiled from various public domain sources. Entries that did not conform to the preferred standard of British-English spelling were removed.

The list continues to be improved:

• Missing entries are discovered and added
• Ongoing reviews flag undesirable words which are removed
• An update is generally issued when several hundred entries have been added since the previous one.

The vocabulary sources include:

• Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (8th Edition)
• Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary (3rd Edition)
• Collins English Dictionary (collinsdictionary.com)
• Oxford Learner's Dictionaries (oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com)
• Cambridge Dictionary (dictionary.cambridge.org).

In addition to the above, various online sources and publications are regularly sampled to keep the word list relevant and up-to-date.

Inclusion Rules

The list contains words conforming to the preferred standard of British-English spelling.

• -ise is preferred over -ize, -sation over -zation, etc.
• US-English spelling is not allowed (e.g. color, odor, etc.)
• Some (few) universally-recognised words are allowed and included, such as movie, bike, soccer, vacation, et al.
• Common proper names are included; not just common British / English names but also common names from around the world.
• A limited number of hyphenated words are present but only where the individual words are not already included.

English borrows some words from French and other languages and therefore inherits the associated diacritical marks. A limited number of such words with diacritics are included; however, the non-diacritical form should also be added. For example:

Licence

This project is made available under a GPL3 licence -- see COPYING for the full text.